Show notes #3: Thomas Robb on the Extensive Reading Foundation and the 4th World Congress on Extensive Reading

Welcome to the third episode of the Extensive Reading Podcast. In this episode we include the first part of a long interview with Thomas Robb, who has been implementing extensive reading programmes since the 1980s at Kyoto Sangyo University and who is probably best known as the creator and administrator of the M-Reader, a very helpful programme for teachers and students doing extensive reading. In this first part of the interview he tells us about his early experiences with ER, about the origins of the JALT ER SIG (the extensive reading special interest group at the Japan Association for Language Teaching), which played an important role in the creation of the Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF), about the ERF itself and its different activities to promote extensive reading, and finally, about the 4th World Congress on Extensive Reading, which will take place in Tokyo from August 4th to 7th, and which he will be co-chairing. We’d like to thank Kyoto Sangyo University for letting as use this nice recording studio to record this interview.

In the Continuing the Debate section for this episode we keep coming to terms with our different views on the role of output in language acquisition.